Theoretical work for the Large Hadron Collider and an after-school science club

By Grove Potter

“In some ways it is some of the most exciting times because we do not know what’s going to happen next.”

Ciaran Williams, assistant professor

UB Department of Physics

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A University at Buffalo assistant
professor of physics has won a prestigious grant that helps science
at both ends of the academic spectrum.

Ciaran Williams, PhD, has been awarded a 5-year, $400,000
National Science Foundation CAREER award to continue his
theoretical work for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project and
also reach out to Native American high school students about
interesting scientific possibilities and opportunities.

The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle
accelerator, a 17-mile ring built hundreds of feet underground on
the border of Switzerland and France. The machine — the
world’s most complex experimental facility — is
designed to smash beams of protons together at near the speed of
light to create conditions similar to those of the Big Bang at the
beginning of the universe.

The energetic collisions create new particles — for split
seconds — and reveal secrets about how matter is formed. In
2012, physicists at the LHC succeeded in creating a Higgs boson,
the final missing piece of experimental data needed to complete the
Standard Model, upon which modern physics is built.

Williams has been doing theoretical work for the LHC, making
mathematical models to predict what the LHC experiments will show.
With the grant, he will be performing cutting-edge calculations at
“Next-to-Next-to Leading Order” accuracy and beyond,
and implementing the results into a publicly available computer
code, MCFM.

“Most particle physicists are in some way connected to the
LHC,” Williams said. A community of approximately 2,000
physicists around the world work on the theoretical side of the
collider’s experiments, and up to 3,000 work on the larger
experiments themselves, he said.

“As far as we know, it’s the coldest place in the
universe,” at -456 degrees Fahrenheit (-271 C) Williams said
of the collider. “It’s colder than deep space. It takes
months to cool down.”

The calculations Williams tackles can take up to a year to
solve. He works with others, and they compare their calculations to
make sure they are on target. UB has a robust physics department,
with several PhDs focused on particle physics and cosmology, in
addition to a strong LHC experimental program.

So how will students at Salamanca High School relate to such
high-level physics?

“The idea is it will be an after-school club,”
Williams said. “Every couple of weeks, two or three
undergraduates and I will go to Salamanca to do lectures on
interesting aspects of physics. The main emphasis is to encourage
their participation in further education, by showing them
that physics students are no different from themselves, and
engaging them interesting aspects of
fundamental science.”

Native Americans are underrepresented in the science,
technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.

In addition, Williams plans to take two or three of the top
students to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a particle
physics lab in Illinois where he performed postdoctoral research.
In addition to physics, the laboratory has an environmental science
component, including ecology and prairie restoration.

“The idea is we encourage the students to maximize their
ability,” Williams said. “It doesn’t have to be
in physics.”

Expanding CERN’s machinery

The LHC was built and is operated by the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN), and since the Higgs boson was
discovered, its mission has entered an unknown phase.

“In some ways it is some of the most exciting times
because we do not know what’s going to happen next,”
Williams said.

One possibility for the next discovery could be dark matter, a
material that occupies more than a quarter of the universe but has
never been examined. Or it could be discoveries related to
supersymmetry, a theory that would balance all of the
universe’s forces.

“If no discoveries are made, the LHC will push the
boundaries of these hypotheses far beyond our current
understanding,” he said. “However to conclusively rule
out supersymmetry a much larger collider will be needed, and one is
being planned.”

In addition to being a “beacon for international
cooperation,” Williams said the collider and the effort
behind it represent something profound about the human experience.
“All of our modern technology is based upon ideas that were
once completely abstract ‘blue skies’ research. We
don’t know exactly which of our current pure science
investigations will lead to breakthroughs, but by pushing the
boundaries of human knowledge further, we allow for possibilities
in the future we can’t even imagine right now.”